Been trying to figure out a user friendly alternative that I can get my less technical friends to transition to. We all use Signal already for messaging but it just doesn’t fulfill our screenshare needs.
Most important feature it needs is the ability to screenshare with system audio, such as for streaming games or watching videos.
I’d ideally also like it to be E2EE just for the sake of privacy and security.
From what I’ve read and looked into it seems the closest thing that meets my needs would be Teamspeak 6 as you can host it yourself, and with the new update it now allows screenshare with audio (either as P2P or via server).
As far as I can tell chat messages don’t persist by default but it can be enabled (and this would be a feature my friends would really want too).
I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but I’m aware it’s a bit old and is ARM so I’m thinking of buying a Pi 5.
Do you think I’m on the right track here or are there any other options this community would recommend?
I use Matrix with the Jitsi plugin. I know everyone talks shit about Matrix, it’s been flawless for me.
IDK about watching videos, that’s a lot to ask of a screensharing app.
What Matrix client do you use?
Element
What kind of deal-with-the-devil black magic fuckery have you done to be able to write that? I’m happy if Matrix actually sends damn pictures and gave up completely on verifying my sessions.
I find Matrix janky but still usable. What homeserver implementation and what client are you using? I use tuwunel and nheko. tuwunel works great for me and I think it’s probably a disservice to the Matrix protocol that the “canonical” homeserver implementation is written in Python. Nheko is somewhat janky for me but I like it more than Element, and I think most of the jankiness is because of the Matrix protocol rather than the client implementation.
@communism @Natanox I’d argue the client itself has a fair bit of jank, though. Like, the background bubble color around text is too dark, it makes it look really ugly and dated. Pinned messages in a channel, when displayed at the top, literally overwrite each other. You’ll just have garbled/overlapping text.
Neochat looks much better out of the box (but neochat is also buggy w/ e2ee, dropping encryption keys randomly).
Yeah that’s fair. nheko is themable with qt themes though; I have it set to use my system qt theme. But I agree the UI gets a bit clunky. I think I just picked nheko cause it seemed the most feature complete when I looked, but I’ve just been using it since then so maybe the meta has changed.
Huh, it’s been nearly flawless for me as well. Had it randomly hang once a few months ago but I think that may have been due to a lack of resources for that lxc. Other than that it’s been flawless over multiple apps: Linux, Android (element, schildichat next, fluffy), windows, web. All synced and verified.
I’ve been using it for about 6 months, self-hosted. No problems at all after I moved from sqlite to a proper postgre server. Before that verifications often timed out.
Meanwhile I’m just out here banging my head against a wall for hours having tried to make it work on Unraid and ended up not succeeding…
100%. Not to mention being slow as hell.
Wait there’s a jitsi plugin?
The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.
Okay that makes so much sense, because I knew I had calling before in Element but they wanted me to set up all this extra stuff. Is it still a thing to do the plugin?
Now elemt calling is all integrated like on discord, if your homeserver supports it. Also available on other clients but I don’t quite remember which ones.
element call is still a separate thing, but I guess it’s better integrated now